America...the newest third world country.

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana

Now the ball is in the court of the Federal Reserve, Bob, and they are petrified at allowing interest rates to climb to normal levels, causing the stock market to collapse.

set poor against rich, class against class-- in order to exploit class envy and hatred

when top marginal rates were confiscatory, taxpayers engaged in numerous business activities whose sole purpose was to shelter income. Why would anyone knowingly do something to make money if 90% of it or more got taken by the taxman? When the marginal rates dropped, the tax shelters became uneconomic and it became cheaper to pay the tax. Not surprisingly, the share of taxes paid by those with the highest incomes rose.

But that's irrelevant to the politics of envy.

John

That is the point, we have pennies and they have millions. Who is going win??

“I know that I do not know whether or not my tax returns are accurate, which is a sad commentary on governance in our nation’s capital,”
“I do hope that at some point in my lifetime, and I am now in my 80s, so there are not many years left, the U.S. government will simplify the U.S. tax code so that those citizens who sincerely want to pay what they should, are able to do it right, and know that they have done it right.”
Donald Rumsfeld

The economist Thomas Piketty has observed that when the rate of return on capital is higher than the economy's growth rate capital income will rise faster than wages and salaries.

JohnM wrote: JohnE, To whom much is given, much is required is a teaching out of the bible.



They talk about it but don't walk it.

#14.
Well done USA. Behind Poland. But at least we're ahead of the Czech Republic and Switzerland.

JohnE...simple question, why can't Walmart pay a liveable wage to a majority of it employees??

He is of the opinion that what has occurred in the last century is an anomaly - wages growing faster than capital income - and that the reverse is the normal mode. Not good news!

Did the American Enterprise Institute pay you to say that?

What constitutes a "living wage," and why should Walmart pay it to a majority of its employees?

Well done USA. Behind Poland. But at least we're ahead of the Czech Republic and Switzerland.
We're not quite 3d world yet, but we're trying hard.

Their method of selling things at low prices is based entirely on exploitation of low wage labor, at home and overseas. Not to mention entering communities and wiping out their retailing.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America

... genius advent of the 401k.

Nobody is forcing anyone to work at Walmart.

By far that must have been one of the hardest things for you to say with a straight face. The 401K is a tax exemption that mostly only the affluent can take advantage of. People lost their pensions, and got to put some of their own money money into the Wall Street casino instead. Companies love the 401k, which should be a good sign that workers got screwed.

No, just creating an environment where there are fewer and fewer decent alternative. It is like providing someone nothing but gruel to someone and saying you aren't forcing them to eat it.

This is what I don't get about unions. Why do we need them, other than for unfair labor pressure and politics.

Your understanding of Walmart workers is poorly informed.

The majority of them happen to be single parents, by design, in fact. These are the workers that Walmart wants: too desperate to quit or raise a stink, and too strung out by circumstances to find better employment.

Because they are forced to work limited hours, for sh#t pay, they often work second jobs, to barely support themselves and their kids.

Many are some manner of government assistance.

Perhaps you think these workers spend the other half of their time smoking weed behind the 7-11 like you might have seen in the hood. Likelier that they're at their second jobs flipping burgers, changing the sheets in some grubby motel, or scrubbing toilets in Highlands Ranch.

I get it. You grew up poor in a crap neighborhood, surrounded by the lazy and the violent. Big fukking deal.

I did too.

These are the places broken by unemployment and callous capitalism.

Look at what's happened to detroit, and countless other inner cities where those that could moved out, and those that couldn't became the lazy and violent you deride.

Maybe you think a "living wage" is fallacious.

Maybe you can explain why the richest country in the history of humanity can justify having (any) full time workers forced to live hand to mouth in abject poverty, ignored by a government that heaps so much on it's wealthiest citizens.

I simply suggest that the wealthy are required to reinvest their money back into society where their wealth springs from in an equitable manner, and in proportion to what they gain from society.

They gain a great deal more from public education for instance. Since most wealthy have or manage large numbers of publicly educated. Educations the wealthy did not have to pay the training fees for. Generally they gain more financial reward from the employees education than the employee does. (or they wouldn't be hiring)

The wealthy and their companies use and gain more from public infrastructure. The wealthy use the civil legal system more.

It would be insane and unfair to destroy the wealthy.. they should reap reward for their intelligent and specialized efforts. I recommend a return to the 50% tax rate for wealthy. That was about the tax rate under Raygun.

I certainly do not suggest the 90% tax rate we had for some decades. (which even then did not destroy the nation)

Look, FLAT TAX or shut up!

Sorry, but I find the whole liberal "soft slavery" bit to be demeaning to them and to society at large. Those that CAN do train up and move up. Those that CAN'T (for a host of reasons) are doing well to have a job that requires SO little of them in the way of skills and customer relations.

Capitalism is the only reason this nation can STILL make it AT ALL

We don't like to lose to Europe.

You liberals actually think that wealth redistribution is the answer, but we have decades of data proving that as you increase the tax rate, you actually reduce taxes paid.

There are actually few people on ST that have been there and done that. For most of you, you're babble liberal theory and peddling "soft sympathy." I know first-hand what I'm talking about; so don't even start to accuse me of not knowing the "plight of the poor."

America is mismanaged by idiots who have risen into power.

"placed in power"

As to the substance of the article, we've had enough debate elsewhere. I'll simply say this: when top marginal rates were confiscatory, taxpayers engaged in numerous business activities whose sole purpose was to shelter income.

Not surprisingly, the share of taxes paid by those with the highest incomes rose.

But that's irrelevant to the politics of envy.

...increased government spending more than any predecessor since Lyndon B. Johnson

Overcapacity, corporate scandals, and uncertainty have and will continue to weigh down the economy.

The tax cut plan proposed by President Bush is not the answer to these problems. Regardless of how one views the specifics of the Bush plan, there is wide agreement that its purpose is a permanent change in the tax structure and not the creation of jobs and growth in the near-term.

Mortagage-backed securities. This is what happens when gov't gets involved in the private-sector.


More brainless opinion from blurring.

Feel free to explain the logic.

Galt became the prototype of the kind of "supermanager" these business schools were supposed to crank out.

"Why would anyone knowingly do something to make money if 90% of it or more got taken by the taxman?"

This is what happens when gov't gets involved in the private-sector.

Come on Blue, . Even you have said in the past that we need reasonable and sound government regulation. Are you now saying that we shouldn't have any regulation? If you believe in any form of government regulation, then in the future you might want to be a bit more careful about these kinds of mindless ranting statements.

I never claimed you lied, stop being a victim.

Again, you can never condemn stupid policies by Dems. I understand this mindset.

that you are undermining of the middle-class, when 100,000 dollars a year can't buy you a home.

the only way moving to Texas or Arizona helps you is if you can get a job there with similar pay. You could do the same thing in Fresno or any of the other cities in the San Joaquin, except further north in Sacto.. but once again you would have to get similar pay to what you are making now. That isn't always easy or even possible.

Bluething, stay away from the logic, it needs advanced study...

And this explains the expansion of Texas. No Taxes.

Logic and truth are very clear and simple

Play by the rules, no exemptions, you're f*#ked 33% roughly. And that's just Fed taxes!

Firm Contracted to Build Fence on US-Mexico Border is Fined for Hiring Illegal Workers
One of the firms working on the US-Mexico Border Fence has been fined $5 million for hiring illegal immigrants. This controversy was ironically predicted by comedians such as George Lopez, who jokingly says in his new act, "They want to build a fence along the border to keep out Mexicans, but who's gonna build it?" Answer: Mexicans.
The Golden State Fence Company will not only pay a major fine, but two of its executives will have to serve jail time for the hirings.
The company's attorney stated that this all goes to show that the country needs to adopt a robust guest-worker program.
AP Photo by Denis Poroy

it is the establishment in Ca. Everything works AGAINST the middle class. The illegal immigrant and the elite have more rights and more tax havens, think about it!

What has Obam (and the Dems) done to improve the problem of wage/income stagnation among the masses?

Especially not inner-city Main Street.

Raising the minimum wage wouldn't help the unemployed in the inner city

let’s take a look at where these economists, and all the other researchers investigating the minimum wage, do agree: They all tend to think that raising the minimum wage would reduce poverty. That’s the conclusion of a major new paper by Dube, titled “Minimum Wages and the Distribution of Family Incomes.”
Let’s first highlight the major results. Dube uses the latest in minimum-wage statistics and finds a negative relationship between the minimum wage and poverty. Specifically, raising the minimum wage 10 percent (say from $7.25 to near $8) would reduce the number of people living in poverty 2.4 percent. (For those who thrive on jargon, the minimum wage has an “elasticity” of -0.24 when it comes to poverty reduction.)
Using this as an estimate, raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, as many Democrats are proposing in 2014, would reduce the number of people living in poverty by 4.6 million. It would also boost the incomes of those at the 10th percentile by $1,700.

Whatever he did in his basement had zip to do with his essential presence in the book.

“Humanity is sick and dying, from the inside out, because we have forgotten our innate sovereignty and our bond with creation and the Creator. Nobody can mediate or create that bond for another, and justice is an empty shell without the personal capacity to be a just and virtuous man or woman. Benjamin Franklin said that only a virtuous people could be self-governing, for with personal corruption always comes political tyranny. So the new Covenant recognizes itself as both a new law and a new spirit, one supporting and feeding the other.”

seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest—his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not—he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country. Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances—what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits.

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp, and fashioned them at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a net-work of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described, might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom; and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people. Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions; they want to be led, and they wish to remain free: as they cannot destroy either one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite; they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large that holds the end of his chain. By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master, and then relapse into it again. A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience.

That wouldn't help the unemployed though. Nobody will tell you raising the minimum wage will increase the number of jobs.

Blue if you are paying a true 33% federal tax rate you must be doing alright. Federal taxes are progressive. If you fall into the 33 percent tax bracket, it does not mean that all of your income is taxed at 33 percent. If you earn between $174,400 and $379,150 as an individual (more if you are married), you are in the 33 percent tax bracket. The first $8,500 is taxed at the 10 percent rate. Income from $8,500 up to $34,500 is taxed at a rate of 15 percent, income from $34,500 to $50,000 is taxed at 25 percent so on and so on. If your income includes long term capital gains and qualified dividends they will be taxes at a lower rate. Of course you probably know all this and are just spouting out an ignorant Rush Limbaugh sound bite to troll.

Someone with a AGI of $300K+ , their real Federal tax-rate would probably be around 24%. If you cannot be motivated to work for 300K a year because of taxes, I am sure some-else will take your place, and you can join John Galt in his choo-choo train riding around in circles up in the Colorado Rockies.

Move to california for a year, and you'll see why everybody has bailed*. They went "John Galt".

Move to california for a year, and you'll see why everybody has bailed

In Congressional testimony on October 23, 2008, Greenspan acknowledged that he was "partially" wrong in opposing regulation and stated "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity – myself especially – are in a state of shocked disbelief."
Referring to his free-market ideology, Greenspan said: "I have found a flaw. I don't know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact."

Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) then pressed him to clarify his words. "In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working," Waxman said. "Absolutely, precisely," Greenspan replied. "You know, that's precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well."[84] Greenspan admitted fault[85] in opposing regulation of derivatives and acknowledged that financial institutions didn't protect shareholders and investments as well as he expected.

Although Greenspan was initially a logical positivist,[51] he was converted to Rand's philosophy of Objectivism by her associate Nathaniel Branden. He became one of the members of Rand's inner circle, the Ayn Rand Collective, who read Atlas Shrugged while it was being written. During the 1950s and 1960s Greenspan was a proponent of Objectivism, writing articles for Objectivist newsletters and contributing several essays for Rand's 1966 book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal including an essay supporting the gold standard.[52][53] Rand stood beside him at his 1974 swearing-in as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. Greenspan and Rand remained friends until her death in 1982.

Having studied Philosophy, I can't call Ayn Rand's work philosophical.

Statistically there is zero correlation between minimum wage changes and employment rates.

She made me kinda ill. Self-centered to the core.

the flat tax is a regressive tax..

The politics of every dime of productivity increase by working Americans in the last 15+ years going to the top 1%? That's really your definition of "envy?" It's actually worse than that seeing as wages relative to inflation have actually decreased in that amount of time for middle class Americans so the 1%ers are taking all the productivity gains PLUS the inflationary gains.

That's true. People used to figure out ways to get out of paying 70% or 90% income tax rates. Now they do the exact same thing to get out of paying 36% income tax rates. In a world where 10% is considered an excellent investment, they will do it at basically any income tax rate.

Of course to someone who believes in the Just World Fallacy it's a lot easier to write that all off to "envy" instead of identifying a structural flaw in our economic and social models. The Greatest Generation's success was in no small way grounded in robust government programs, a high minimum wage and strong union participation...all things which are completely ignored in the current debate.

The flat tax makes no sense to me. It will only keep the poor...poor.

(of a tax) taking a proportionally greater amount from those on lower incomes.

I think a rate of 39 percent is fair for the wealthy.

One more thing, then I'm done for awhile again (gotta work)....

Most of them aren't even white,

Really...who lifestyle is gonna take the biggest hit?

Fifteen percentage of $20,000 or 15 percent of $500,000.


Regressive to the poor.

Mad...go here. http://www.lp.org/


Have fun.

flat tax is regressive because it takes a higher proportion of income compared to cost of living for lower incomes.
Said a little more plainly: If A makes a lot less income than B, A requires a much larger share (as much as 100%) of his income just to stay alive

Ask Madbolter.....he seems to have the inside line on why poor people suck.

If A makes a lot less income than B, A requires a much larger share (as much as 100%) of his income just to stay alive

You don't SOLVE that problem by STEALING from the "wealthy."

Who said it did??

What does exist is this...16th Amendment to the Constitution made the income tax a permanent fixture in the U.S. tax system.

And what has existed since the start of the nation is taxes...like it or not.

Could you also give me an example of a Libertarian run country?

I call that poor decision-making.

You DO solve the problem by stopping the rich from stealing from the producers, though.

Care to cite some support for that novel proposition, HT? There is very strong evidence that raising the minimum wage decreases minimum wage employment.

I believe in private property rights, but I also believe that in order for society to be cohesive, it must ensure the vast majority of it's members are "far enough from the left wall", as you put it. Otherwise, why participate in society in a meaningful and positive way, as it wouldn't be in any way in your own interest.

Also, if this country is founded on private property rights as you put it, wouldn't that have grown out of a "distance from the left wall" argument, since the reason we worry about government encroachment and the taking of private property is this would allow the government to put us all "on the left wall"?

Capital expenditures that have been happening overseas....if at all, as you purport. Besides, the largest factor in the growth of worker productivity (output per hour worked) is in wages remaining flat as hours worked have increased. Unpaid overtime, lack of raises, wage reductions, have all contributed mightily to "productivity". I have a sneaky suspicion that the reintroduction of slavery would see a huge jump in productivity.

Founded using slaves and stolen land. Is that philosophical libertarianism?